Bear Hunt (Bear Lodge Shifters Book 3) Read online

  BEAR LODGE SHIFTERS – Book 3

  Bear Hunt

  Kyrii Rayne

  Dreamstone Publishing © 2019

  www.dreamstonepublishing.com

  Copyright © 2019 Dreamstone Publishing and Kyrii Rayne

  All rights reserved.

  No parts of this work may be copied without the author’s permission.

  ISBN: 978-1-925915-05-1

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organisations, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - Breakfast with Bears

  Chapter 2 - Someone Else's Karma

  Chapter 3 - Taking Sides

  Chapter 4 - Storm Warning

  Chapter 5 - Esme

  Chapter 6 - Kidnappers

  Chapter 7 - Something More to Fight For

  Chapter 8 - Refusing to Say Goodbye

  Chapter 9 - Angry Bears and Madmen

  Chapter 10 - Loose Ends

  About the Author

  Here is your preview of Bear Trap

  Chapter 1 - Damage Control

  Other Books from Kyrii Rayne

  Other Books from Dreamstone Publishing

  Chapter 1 -

  Breakfast with Bears

  Anna Moretti got up with the sun, her usual early-morning grumbly stomach replaced with a slight queasiness that made it hard to rest comfortably. As she crossed the wood-paneled bedroom with its window-wall overlooking a deep gorge, she heard the springs of the mattress bounce behind her as a heavy weight rolled over into her warm spot. She glanced back with a smile; the mound of comforters wiggled slightly and then let out a rumbling snore. Jake Matson, her new fiancé, was kind of huge even in human form. It made him a great bed-warmer on chilly winter mornings like this one, and she had been reluctant to leave the limp circle of his muscular arms.

  She showered and dressed in jeans and a sweater the same green as her eyes, and watched him sleep as she combed out her wavy honey-colored hair. Despite his size, Jake had a baby face, the innocence of his open, gentle features emphasized in slumber. Their months together had been an intense adventure — and despite the perils that sometimes struck in the process, she had never been happier.

  Before all of this had happened, just a few months ago, she had been an ordinary graduate student starting to date a guy whom she had thought was also an ordinary graduate student. But Jake and his family were anything but ordinary, and their lives, though fascinating, also held more danger than those of normal humans.

  She was now engaged to a man who could turn into a gigantic grizzly bear at will, and access certain of the animal's abilities even when in human form. His strength was superhuman, making his gentle-giant nature even more important to their relationship. His appetite was also superhuman; in fact, all his appetites were. Anna had absolutely no problem with that; quite the contrary. Even if it left her thoroughly exhausted and a bit sore at times.

  The problem came not in Jake's nature, what he could do or what he needed, but rather bear shifters' place in the world, and the ways some of them related to humanity. The Lodge where they lived now, in the mountains near Jackson, Wyoming, had been built to give shelter to an enclave of wealthy bear shifters. Created a generation ago by Jake's father and the Lodge leader, Helga Thorsdottr, the Lodge gave the Bears a place to be themselves in a world that could not learn about them. But keeping a secret that big wasn't always easy.

  Jake made an interrogative noise as he heard her moving around, and she touched his mussy coffee-colored hair lightly as she went by, soothing him. Her belly issues didn't require him to get up at some ridiculous hour. Best that one of them got decent sleep. She went to the window, watching the dawn light slowly seep down along the steep walls of the gorge. Right now, the waterfall that dominated the view was half-frozen, great icicles hanging from the cliffs between thin sprays of water. Dead vegetation clung to the steep hillsides, rimed with frost, and bald trees stuck their spindly arms skyward between rough-furred pines. A path switchbacked its way up the hill, toward a little bower about halfway up. It had been cut by enormous bear claws, and the rustic bench that sat there had been twisted carefully from live branches by powerful hands. She knew whose hands, and smiled a little as she spied the culprit heading up the path.

  Of all of those who lived at the Lodge, Jake's brother Gray probably had the strangest history. The figure who plodded up the hill, moving slowly so that his much smaller companion could keep up, looked less like an ordinary man than some kind of lost caveman who had wandered into the modern age. He was even larger and more heavily muscled than his brother, close to seven feet, with grizzled, shaggy hair that flopped into his eyes and grew down to his shoulders in back. He did shave these days, but his hair grew so fast he was never without stubble. He had finally consented to shoes — hiking boots — and a blue plaid work shirt to go with his jeans. But even now, with his huge size, shagginess and lumbering walk, he looked very much like what he was: a being who had lived as a bear for most of his life, and only now was learning what it was to live as a man.

  There was a lot more to his story than that, of course. But most of it was horrible, and not worth thinking about on a fine morning with nothing bad happening. Especially when her stomach was already unsettled.

  She watched Gray gently move beside the smallish, white-blonde woman who picked her way up the trail, sometimes holding his enormous hand, sometimes simply hiking along gamely as they headed for their little spot a quarter mile up the path. Julia, a ranger trainee, was in the same position as Anna in many ways: one of the bear shifters had imprinted on her as his mate. The difference was that poor Gray was still figuring out the human half of his life, which made negotiating their relationship much trickier.

  In the month since Julia had started visiting them regularly, he had made great strides, doing everything he could to learn things like reading and using those ridiculous tiny utensils at dinner. Watching his massive form bent over, tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth as his enormous fingers struggled with his boot laces, had been so adorable Anna could almost forget the hellish way in which she had first met him.

  Behind her, Jake snorted and rolled over again, one arm flopping out over the pillow next to him. He blinked his eyes open, then peered at her.

  “You okay?”

  “It's my stomach again. I'll be okay.” She came over to kiss him, and he circled her wrist gently with one large hand.

  “Sorry, baby. You think you'll beat this queasiness thing in time for breakfast?” He sat up slowly, the comforter falling down around his rippled, slightly hairy front as he stretched.

  “I should. Not sure what's going on here. It's been over a week.” She watched Julia sit down on the woven bench, and Gray crouch at her feet, so that they were almost at eye level. Julia reached out and caressed his strangely-colored hair, and he leaned into her touch a little, his expression unreadable from this distance but his gestures soft and shy. She turned away, giving them their privacy, and gave Jake a distracted smile.

  “Yeah. There's a decent gastro person in Jackson that Helga goes to if it comes down to it, but I really hope whatever is bugging you doesn't actually need a doctor.”

  Maybe because he was overprotective, maybe because his own shifter regeneration protected him from things like minor illnesses, Jake always overreacted a bit when she was under the weather.

  “Me too. We have enough going on in a given week without my having developed a food allergy or something.” She rubbed her face and felt his arms circle her as he stood up.

  “It'll be ok
ay.” He kissed the top of her head and nestled against her from behind, his hot, heavy body seeming to partially engulf hers thanks to their difference in size. “Maybe it'll warm up enough for a proper hike today.”

  “Hope so.” It had been a stunningly mild winter except for a few deep freezes in late December. Anna, who loved hiking even after a recent ordeal that had forced her to use her forestry skills to survive, had gotten to go out a few times for fun, with Jake always at her side. After everything that had happened, he had a tendency to hover, which given the circumstances, she didn't mind at all. “You want to come with me to see if anyone's up yet, or hang out here?”

  “Give me fifteen and I'll pull together,” he replied casually, headed for the bathroom. He was naked as usual — even if they wore nightclothes to bed, they usually didn't stay on through the night — and she watched the light gleam off his skin as he strolled across the room. Despite her queasiness, she had to push aside a surge of desire. Time enough for things like that when her guts weren't churning. Otherwise, it felt like sex might give her motion sickness.

  Eventually they made their way outside into the Lodge proper: an enormous edifice of split and whole logs, walls of windows, fireplaces filled with crackling flames and high-ceilinged rooms that missed the mark on coziness strictly from their size. They saw perhaps half a dozen of Jake's fellow Bears as they wandered through on their way to Helga's feasting hall. Most were older men unescorted by their human mates, and gave Jake and her brief, tight smiles as greetings and nothing else. Jake had inherited the Lodge after his father's violent death a few months back, and given his relative youth and modest accomplishments, he was struggling to gain the respect of the elders of the Lodge.

  The only one consistently supportive of him and of Anna was Helga herself. The aging Bear leader was weakening quickly due to health issues, however, and though she still held the respect of the majority, problems had started cropping up. Today, as they walked into the long feast hall with its massive table, high seat and circular fireplace, only about half of the Bears seemed to be attending the breakfast meeting. Anna looked worriedly around at the score or so of faces, realizing that the meetings had thinned out in attendance a great deal over the last month or so.

  Nowadays, at least the crowd held more familiar faces. Helga sat at the head of the table, with Gray and Julia to one side of her and seats saved for Jake and Anna across from them. Nearby sat a shorter man with Jake's same coloring, dressed in a charcoal-colored wool suit and poking away at a smart phone screen. “Hey Darrin!” Jake thumped him gently on the shoulder as he passed.

  Darrin looked up and smiled distractedly. “Hey. How's it going, you guys?” He sounded so nervous that even sleepy Anna picked up on it right away.

  “More of the same. You OK?” Anna peered at Darrin, whose dark eyes had a gleam of fear in the backs of them.

  “I would be except for this morning's news.” Darrin swallowed, and shot them both a thin smile. “Brace yourselves, it's not good.”

  Anna felt her stomach knot up further as she touched his shoulder and nodded, heading for her seat.

  Helga looked up at her and smiled as she pulled her chair out. “Good morning, dear. I do wish I had good news to bring you, but unfortunately it is not that kind of morning.” She was the eldest of the Bears, looking perhaps sixty but in fact far older, with gray and gold mixing in her braided hair, a kind, lined face and soft blue-gray eyes. She wore her usual sort of robe-like dress, this one a dull pine green, though she had left behind the bearskin cloak that she often wore to meetings.

  “I understand. Darrin told us to brace ourselves.” Jake scooted in next to her and Anna went quiet as they exchanged greetings.

  Her stomach gurgled uncomfortably. Hopefully getting some actual food into it would settle it.

  “Hi Anna!” rumbled Gray with a big, friendly smile which she weakly returned. His voice was as intimidating as the rest of him, sounding almost as if the stones of the mountain had been given the power of speech. His teeth looked a bit sharper than a normal human's but, as always, the gaze he turned on her was almost as soft as the one he turned on Julia. “Hi brother. They have sausage patties today.” This was apparently a most excellent development, judging by the stacks of the things on his plate.

  “Yeah, I get it. You and grease and spices. Man, if you were human, I'd be worried about your getting heart disease.” He bumped fists with his younger brother all the way across the table.

  “Grease is yummy.”

  He had only started eating meat recently, after a period of being vegetarian in reaction to the horrific diet his father had pushed on him during his captive childhood. And then he had discovered bacon, and sausage patties, and burgers. And that had been that.

  She snickered at him, and waved to Julia as well. “Hey guys.”

  Julia smiled back. “Hey. You have any idea what everyone's freaked out about?” She was the only other human in the room, and if the way Anna was treated by the other Bears was any indication, no one had told her anything yet.

  “Not yet. I know Helga here won't keep us in the dark, though.” She had better not.

  There was a reason why Anna trusted Helga, and it was that she had never caught her in a lie, even one of omission. But right now, even as Helga looked gently back at her and nodded, she had to wonder if Helga didn't keep some things entirely to herself. Like how sick she really was, for example.

  “I smell fear from the others,” Gray said quietly. There were reasons why he was so attuned; once upon a time the one they had been afraid of had been him. Back when he had been a slave of Jake's father, made to terrorize. “It isn't me this time, right?”

  “No, Gray, it can't be. We're not scared of you anymore, so why would big, tough Bears be?” Anna's gaze swept the table, and she noticed that very few people seemed to be keeping their eyes on Gray any more. He hadn't exactly been accepted, but whatever was being whispered and rumor-mongered about right now was apparently more frightening than the bear hybrid could ever hope to be.

  “I'm gonna hit the buffet before things get too serious,” Jake said, then looked at her. “Do you want anything yet?”

  “I think I can try a bagel.”

  She would end up mostly nibbling it until her stomach stopped fizzing like an uncapped soda, but eventually she hoped it would do the trick.

  Helga waited until everyone was settled, and had had a chance to eat and talk for a while, before she stood. Immediately the voices around the table started to die as heads turned in her direction. She coughed quietly into her fist, then looked around at everyone. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am afraid that I have bad news.”

  “As most of you know, we have made it our business for a long time to watch certain individuals in the Bear and Human populations, both locally and abroad, if their associations with us are close enough. A few weeks ago, we started hearing rumors of Hunter activity in Wyoming.”

  A rustle went through the crowd. Whispers rose in a sibilant chorus, and a few around the table went for their whiskey flasks at eight in the morning.

  “Wyoming is sparsely populated. It is one of the reasons that we picked this state as the build site for the Lodge originally. This gives us a lot of wilderness to hide our activities in. However, when we move among humans, we don't have the crowds to lose ourselves in that we might in New York, San Francisco or Seattle. When the Hunters come in, they will start by looking for those of us who live in, or visit, the local cities. They will be looking for any kind of anomaly in behavior, diet or appearance which might pick us out.” She paused. “And it is quite safe to assume that Jackson is one of the places which they will be checking.”

  At that last one, she gave Gray an apologetic look. “We'll have to forgo any more trips into town for a while,” she said gently.

  His face fell. “But Julia lives in town!” His voice filled with so much disappointment that he sounded almost like a kid who had been told Santa doesn't exist.

  J
ulia reached over and clasped his huge hand with both of hers. “I'll visit more. I'll take the copter over every morning before class. I just need to visit my place to feed the dogs and look after things.”

  Helga looked around at the others. “We must suspend any of the seasonal hunts we were planning for the next month or so, until they move on. My hope is that this will prove to be a close call for us, and nothing more. But from now on, continued secrecy and security must be our primary focus.”

  Anna's heart sank. The Lodge was going on lock down, everyone's life was at risk... and Gray and his new love stood to suffer most from the changes they would have to make. “Can't you just bring the dogs here?” she asked Julia. “I'm sorry if that's ignorant, I've never had dogs. I don't know how they would adjust.”

  “Maybe, but it would take a few days at least for me to pack everything up and move here. And I'm still expected at training six days a week.”

  “We can arrange your transport.” Helga gave the girl a smile, and Gray relaxed visibly.

  “Well, the lock down doesn't sound too horrible so far. I mean, what are the chances that they'll find out about the Lodge just rolling through Jackson and watching for us?” Jake shifted in his seat, his voice calmer than most of the others.

  “You don't know what these guys do when they suspect one of us, Jake, you've never lived it.”

  Darrin's statement was quiet and full of a private horror. Anna blinked at him in surprise, and wondered what he had seen and experienced that he wasn't telling them.

  “Okay, point. But my point is, there's not really much chance that they'll learn about the Lodge as long as we're careful about visiting town. The Lodge is on private, patrolled land.”

  Jake looked around before continuing.

  “They have no excuse to be up this way, and even the biggest fanatics among them won't go out of their way to get arrested for something like trespassing. It's a good way to get your weapons confiscated.” Jake looked around for support.